


Always on the Tip of My Tongue

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Oral Sex, Orgasm, Please enjoy!, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Pre-Hiatus (Fall Out Boy), Smut, Summer, Take This To Your Grave (Album), This is a fic about time travel and coming, Time Travel, Touring, Van Days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 17:02:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18898891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: I'm calling you from the future to let you know we made a mistakeTime traveling orgasms. Summer tour. Blow jobs on front porches. Cherry Icees and altering the timeline to save a relationship that hasn't happened yet. You know, normal stuff.





	Always on the Tip of My Tongue

**Author's Note:**

> It’s another shark-myths fic-a-versary in the FOB fandom!
> 
> Every year I say the same thing: I love you guys, this fandom changed my life and heart, Fall Out Boy is joy and seeing in color and embracing the goofy, intense things about yourself instead of performing your own lessening. Girlfic especially revolutionized writing for me: those of you who’ve been with me for Girl Out Boy and Sell Out Girl have witnessed the transformative and healing impact of putting yourself and your girlhood and your complicated relationship with gender socialization directly into stories, instead of exploring a proxy or a parallel of it. I am so, so grateful to all of you. I plan to keep writing for this fandom for a long time.
> 
> My personal life has been—tumultuous, to say the least, in the last 12 months. But it’s so good, friends. These days I’m happy in a way I can’t ever remember being. The isolation and loneliness that has characterized my, uhhhhh, entire adult life has lifted in a major way. My job is emotionally exhausting and wonderful, and I work directly with queer and trans people all day every day. I have amazing partners, gorgeous friends online and in the actual city I live in, a tiny human in my life, and a 16 year old cat who is my endlessly faithful cranky companion. My eating disorder is in remission, my heartbreak is healed, I’ve started standing up to people who have mistreated me for my whole life, I meditate fucking constantly, I have a whole corner of my apartment dedicated to crystals and plants… I’m in a book club. Me! 
> 
> I truly never knew it was possible for a person like me to live in a way that makes me so happy. I am made of luck—except there’s no such thing as luck, is there? Sometimes things are exactly as bad, or as good, as they seem. 
> 
> This year was also the least fic-writing I’ve done since I joined this fandom. I published only 9 stories—just 149,027, and one of them was a Frerard of all things! (Talk about late arrivals.) I’m so grateful to have you all here, still reading. In the next 12 months I hope to bring you a ridiculously convoluted fake family fic, some hiatus-era Girl Out Boy, the Girl Out Boy witch AU we’ve all seen so many gorgeous moodboards about, and other goodies besides. What would you all like to read from me in the coming year?
> 
> Thank you for your patience with my new, slower posting schedule, and your unending support. Your messages, reviews, care packages, and comments on my tumblr selfies give me energy and light and life. You are my truest feeling yet, guys. There’s no place I’d rather be than here with you.

 

 

 

Patrick is 17 years old and living in a van full of boys the first time he gets hit with a time-traveling orgasm.

Not that he knows that’s what’s happening—it will take him years to figure it out. All he knows is, he’s sleeping uncomfortably on a bench seat when he jolts awake with blood thundering through his dick. He can see two worlds at once: the grim, dirty inside of Joe’s van, filled with equipment and the snores of his bandmates, and a close summer-hot porch, where he stands on dusty boards in the dark and watches someone’s very attractive mouth move up and down his dick, their cheeks hollow and their chin dripping. Patrick feels his own hands make fists of the person’s cotton shirt, hears his own voice say _Fuck, fuck!_ , feels sensations below the belt that he hasn’t experienced yet in linear time. This is his first blowjob. He’s alone, the only one awake in a van, grabbing himself to try to contain whatever’s happening. He’s getting his dick sucked and crying out in pleasure outside somewhere, cicadas humming in the air. He is in both of these moments at once.

Then the person in the vision looks up, meets his eyes in a flash of heroin-gold and amber. Their brow quirks, their mouth conveying a sexy smile even though it’s full of Patrick—and it’s Pete. In the other world, or maybe in this world, in the piece of time that’s kaleidescoped on top on this one, in this waking wet dream, in this incredibly vivid hallucination—the person sucking his dick is Pete.

Patrick comes, crying out in the van and on the porch. He sees Pete, and a deep, melting orgasm unrolls through him, one that makes reality refract like shards of glass. He sees Pete and that’s how he knows for sure he likes boys, that he can’t deny it anymore, that what he’s been feeling isn’t _normal_. Fuck, it’s how he knows he likes _Pete_. It’s how he knows that somehow, somewhere, some _when_ , they’re going to be together. That Pete will grin up at him around Patrick’s dick and Patrick will come apart, and it will feel better than everything he’s ever wanted.

It’s a lot of pressure for an unshowered 17 year old who doesn’t even know what state he’ll be in tomorrow, let alone where he’s going to college or what he’s doing with his life. So Patrick comes, opaque fluid tumbling over his fist, and tries not to think of anything at all.

*

The thing is, Patrick used to think this kind of thing was normal. Not the phantom dick-sucking, but every now and then having one of these life-ruining orgasms that felt, somehow, like it reached back through time or forward into the future and remade the very molecules of him. He used to think of it as _the gold place_ , a level of bliss he spilled himself into every now and then. It was always random—it didn’t seem to be related to how or when he got off—but it was always _good_. Better than good. Pleasure beyond language.

He deduced it was normal, some orgasms are just better than others, based on a potentially flawed scientific method. Which is to say, he asked his older brother. “Hey, um, when you… jerk off… is it ever like, you go off so hard that you see time?”

Kevin had nodded with a far-off look in his eyes. “Yeah, dude,” he said, “and wait til you try it with a _girl_.”

He doesn’t piece together that the orgasms are actually slipping through chronology, ripping through the fourth dimension, happening simultaneously across folds of time, until he gets hit with a backwards first kiss. It would be a weird and specific assumption, wouldn’t it? But when he starts getting hit with ripples coming forward or back through time, while he’s just minding his own business, seeing-feeling flashes of his own past and future life and coming hard, devastating, _gold_ in unsexy, inconvenient situations—when he _experiences in real time_ the exact same orgasm he’d been struck with out of the blue _two months previously_ —he begins to accept that either he’s totally, institutionally sex-addicted and psychotic? Or his orgasms can travel through time.

*

_Fourteen years old, with Tyler Emberton, in the poorly lit corner of the roller rink over by the busted claw machine. It’s like the end of a game of Clue. It’s the first orgasm Patrick ever has with another person. At fourteen his body is a mystery to him, always throbbing and going stiff about something, going off at unpredictable moments with minimal provocation. At fourteen his body is a mystery he compulsively investigates. At fourteen Tyler Emberton is who he’s sleuthing with._

_Tyler has long hair that falls in his eyes and flips up perfectly at the ends. Tyler wears cool t-shirts and carries a skateboard around. No one ever sees him actually ride it, but the bracelets he wears suggest he knows how. By consensus of the girls in the seventh grade, Tyler is extremely cute. And here Tyler is, shoving Patrick by the shoulders, backing Patrick into a corner, accusing, “I saw you looking at me in the locker room, pervert. I see you staring during gym class. You some kind of homo, Stump? Huh?”_

_Patrick’s pulse speeds sickly sweet in nervous veins. His throat’s too thick to get words out, to protest his innocence. Because of course he’s innocent. Of course he is. He’s not looking at Tyler in the locker room—he’s not even looking at himself. Avoid the round belly and awkward pudgy knees, avoid letting his gaze land anywhere, avoid evaluating the underwear of other boys, avoid opening your eyes at all. There’s not a sight, smell, or sensation in the boys’ locker room that Patrick can tolerate. That Patrick trusts himself with._

_Because Tyler Emberton shoving him against the claw machine is making him hard._

_“You like this?” Tyler sneers, face shoved up so close to Patrick’s, he can see the blackheads amid Tyler’s freckles. “You getting off on this, Stump?”_

_Patrick doesn’t answer. Patrick can’t answer. Patrick can’t answer because he won’t let himself. Patrick can’t answer because Tyler is kissing him, hard enough that his head knocks back painful, hard enough that their jaws smash together and pain echoes through his teeth, hard enough that he feels heat and wet and smash and Tyler’s tongue, alien and strange inside his mouth._

_Tyler kisses him and Patrick hates himself. Tyler kisses him and Patrick’s treacherous dick gives him away. Tyler kisses him and Patrick comes. The world thickens, vibrates, turns to gold._

_Patrick’s eyes fly open, at home in his bed in an apartment he shares with three other boys. Patrick isn’t fourteen. Patrick is 20. Patrick is sticky with come and hot with shame, shaking with a memory he’s spent half a decade trying to forget._

*

It’s not like it happens all the time. It’s a rare and spectacular thing, just infrequent enough that for the first couple years, he lets himself believe he’s imagining it. When he experiences the orgasm in his actual, linear, lived timeline, when he comes and it just goes sort of—overwhelming and _gold_ —some half-buried part of him wonders when it’s gonna show up again. It’s the ones that come _back_ through time and show him glimpses of the future that really fuck him up. It seems to happen a little more often when he’s fooling around with other people, like maybe those orgasms are more significant to the timeline. Lays of Future Past, he thinks to himself, and it’s almost a joke—almost funny. Something that possibly happens to everyone and it’s just not polite to talk about. Something a little awkward that feels really, really good, something he thinks he can live with.

Something he thinks he can live with until it happens again with Pete.

*

This time, he’s in the freezer aisle of a Jewel Osco. One minute he’s reaching for dino-shaped chicken nuggets, the next he’s practically keeling over with the dick-jolt of it. He sees the chicken nuggets, but he also sees Pete’s face—Pete’s familiar, _annoying_ face—feels Pete’s hand under his jaw—sees Pete’s eyes close—feels Pete’s breath on his skin—feels Pete’s mouth on his. The phantom-kiss is quick, hard but yielding, with a raggedness, like at any moment it’s going to be taken away—and Patrick is horrified, but the feeling of Pete’s body against his and Pete’s tongue in his mouth is all it takes. Patrick comes.

It’s embarrassing enough that it happens. Coming from a kiss in his—imagination, or hallucination, or whatever. It becomes impossible when he has to stare at Pete all day every day, sharing an apartment and a band and a bathroom with no shower curtain, and remember what it felt like—what it _will_ feel like—to have those lips on his. The full-body electricity of it. It’s like any good first kiss, not that Patrick’s had so many of those: kissing begets more kissing, coming begets more coming. Now that he’s felt Pete’s kiss, all he wants is to feel it again.

The problem is Pete hasn’t felt it yet. (And maybe won’t feel it ever? Causality is confusing. Time-displaced sexual functioning is confusing. Being a 20 year old struggling, gay-ish musician with a crush on your best friend is _fucking confusing_.) For once, Pete doesn’t even realize he’s tormenting Patrick. But just his existence, at this point, is an agony.

Pete at 25 has short black hair with red-tipped bangs, painted nails, and a Sidekick never far from his hand. He wears a minimum of two studded belts at all times and favors tight t-shirts that ride up to show strips of his flat belly, his angled hips. He flirts _constantly,_ with everyone, and Patrick is no exception. Pete’s always teasing him, roughhousing or demanding serenades, pressing his lips against Patrick’s neck or filling his backpack with mayo packets. Pete’s very into piggyback rides, his hips grinding against Patrick’s back like this is totally and completely fine with everyone. Pete smashes his face against Patrick’s back during shows, and together their hollow chests become the echo chamber of a single heart, and they link up so tight in synchronicity there’s no difference between _now_ and _then_ or _him_ and _me_. Moments like these, the points of contact between their bodies light up like burning constellations and extend out through the multiverse, so that Patrick knows from anywhere, these lights will guide him home.

Pete at 25 does all these things, and Patrick is somehow expected to live with the ghostfeel of Pete’s kiss, the imagined-future-memory of _coming in Pete’s mouth_. Patrick has to act like everything’s normal, like he’s not wearing two pairs of briefs to their shows to try and tamp down the wild boner of Pete’s proximity. Patrick, somehow, is expected to just carry on and _live_ with these fantasies, these memories of places he hasn’t ever been and never should have left.

*

“That’s it—we got it!” Joe says over the intercom. He’s beaming on the other side of the recording booth glass. Their first real record, for a label and for _money_ —it’s done. It’s a moment in his life he never all-the-way believed would ever happen, and Pete follows it up with another. Patrick’s feeling incandescent, a ball of light floating at the top of his chest, the feeling of youth and potential and raw happiness. In this moment, anything is possible. Patrick has goosebumps. Then, just like he saw and _felt_ in that freezer aisle two months ago, Pete grabs Patrick’s shoulder. Pete’s grinning face goes serious, closing in on his. Pete’s amber irises and spindle-fall lashes, his gaze made up of heat and shadow—Pete’s soft and parted lips—a slow blink, a hand rough from guitar strings and smelling of steel rising to Patrick’s jaw—and _collision_ , all the top-of-the-coaster potential of a moment ago plummeting screaming into this, this _kiss_.

It’s just like before: quick, hard but yielding, with a raggedness, like at any moment it’s going to be taken away. And the feeling of Pete’s body against his and Pete’s tongue in his mouth is too much. Just like in the memory, or the future memory, the hallucination or the dream—Pete presses close against him, kisses rough, and then breaks away, eyes lit with a broken-bottle shine. And Patrick comes.

That’s when he realizes what’s been happening all this time. Pete’s face is an inch from his, Pete’s cheeks are flushed with smile and heartbeat, and so many impossible things are true at once that Patrick doesn’t know which to lose his mind over first. Patrick licks his own lip, tasting Pete, and says, “ _Time travel_.”

*

Apparently this a weird reaction to a first kiss. Patrick doesn’t know, it’s just what came out of his mouth. Pete takes it weirdly, anyway. Patrick is busy trying to angle his body to best conceal the wet spot that will soon be visible in his jeans, isn’t monitoring him as closely as he usually would. Pete steps back frowning and marches to the recording booth glass. He plants a huge, wet, theatrical kiss on the glass in front of Joe’s face. “Andy! You’re next! Celebration make-outs all around.”

Patrick watches him go. His heart is bursting in his ears, his whole body made of gold. He’s just discovered time travel, just come so hard it displaced time, _and_ just been kissed by the person he’s kind of, maybe, sort of, don’t look at it too closely, _in love with_. He couldn’t form an intelligent sentence if his life depended on it, in other words. So he doesn’t say anything to stop Pete leaving, doesn’t say ‘I liked that, come back, kiss me again, kiss me forever.’ Mostly he’s dazzled. 80% dazzled, 20% needs new pants.

Pete avoids him after that, or at least what constitutes avoidance by Pete Wentz, which looks a little like a fat mosquito trying to avoid a bug zapper—Pete just keeps smacking into him. Like: they still spend all their free time together, but now Pete sits on the floor instead of half on Patrick’s lap. Now Pete sleeps in his own bed instead of stealing into Patrick’s, sweaty from nightmares and smelling so good Patrick has to pretend that he’s dead, laying so still he’s not even breathing, to keep from putting his hands on him. Now Pete asks Joe for piggybacks first instead of just directly and without permission jumping on Patrick.

There’s no hint that Pete ever intends to kiss Patrick again—though Patrick has no idea how you can kiss someone like that and not immediately want to do it again. Maybe he’d believe it really just was a one-off, meaningless excited Pete shit, except that he was there—he _felt_ it—it wasn’t just real, it was the realest he’s ever been— _both times_.

That, and he’s pretty sure Pete’s gonna go down on him at some point in the future. Maybe even soon. Fuck. He hopes it’s soon. He gets a little hard just thinking about it.

*

Patrick almost never makes it to the gold place when he’s alone anymore, but by the time they go on tour for _Grave_ , he’s getting hit by future memories of coming with Pete, in Pete, on Pete, because of Pete _all the time_. Apparently there’s going to be a lot of sex in his future. Getting hit with all those visions has him so horny he’s seeing double, and going through underwear at a rate he totally didn’t pack for. Maybe this sounds fun to you, but then, you’ve probably never come so hard during soundcheck that your legs give out and you double over gasping in the middle of Ohio.

He sees-feels-fuckfuck _fucks_ Pete, only he doesn’t see Pete, he just sees rumpled sheets, he’s on his knees, he’s being fucked from behind and it is filthy, it is scandalous, it’s something he’s never let himself even think about wanting, and he _knows_ it’s Pete by some deep inner compass, some rightness, some internal _click_ that feels like love—or maybe that’s just his prostate, and whatever it is Pete’s hitting it, and he feels hot breath on the back of his neck and feels teeth graze his shoulders and hears a strangled gasp of “Fuck, Patrick,” and then he’s in some future-bed and onstage at once, buckling over his guitar, in both places coming hot and violent on his knees.

They aren’t even alone—the opening band and a bunch of crew are here, milling around, listening to soundcheck—a girl Pete’s been flirting with and her friends showed up, Very Important Pete People—and basically Patrick has to pretend he rode his guitar to the floor on purpose, as part of a Cool Move™, and the big gaspy cry was just him getting swept up in the moment, even though all he was doing was tuning his rig. Ugh. Patrick’s life is _so_ embarrassing.

“You okay, dude?” Pete murmurs, clapping a hand to Patrick’s shoulder as he passes with his bass, twitching the cord so it snakes past Patrick’s sneakers.

Patrick presses into Pete’s touch automatically, his back arching with the last of his pleasure, and he makes a sound that does not bear transcription. He makes a sound like Pete just fucked him so hard he saw stars, broke time, fell down. A normal person would not do this. A normal person, in Pete’s position, would recoil. But Pete’s hand makes a brief, tight fist of Patrick’s shirt, and he pulls Patrick towards him, so that for one precious moment Patrick’s forehead brushes against Pete’s belt and he shudders. Pete releases him, takes an unsteady step away, and Patrick thinks, _he feels it too_. Not the hyperspatial orgasms—there’s no way Pete could keep a thing like that secret—but the frission and the longing. The Pete-and-Patrick. The deep-belly pull like leaning over the edge of a fire escape. Inevitability.

*

The more it happens with the same person, the more that starts to come through. Not just the moment of coming, but some of the passion beforehand, the tenderness after. Not just the sense of touch, but the _smell_ of Pete, the _goodness_ of his strong sinewy arms wrapped around Patrick. The ways that it’s somehow just _right_ , meant-to-be. And other emotions too: Patrick starts to get a bleedthrough of however he’s feeling at whatever time the orgasm is coming from.

If he ever had any hope of _not_ falling in love with Pete Wentz, the world’s most infuriating person? It’s obliterated now. Washed away by the tide of his own future love. That and the epic proportions of his past, present, and soon-to-be horniness.

*

_“I wish we had a nicer place to fuck than the van,” Pete says, wincing a little as they survey the discarded-fast-food-wrapper, crumbs-of-ages, wrinkled-unwashed-laundry, carpet-stain reality of the vehicle stretching before them. Their hands are knotted together between them with nerves. Pete’s got lube in his pocket, the bottle’s outline seeming as obvious to Patrick as a neon sign that flashes_ GAYS SEEK HOOK-UP LOCATION. _It’s only the third time they’re doing this, this penetrative sex thing, and Patrick’s just as nervous as the last two times._

_It’s autumn, the very last leg of their meandering summer tour. They’re playing small stages at a few festivals, then heading back to Chicago, where Patrick doesn’t know what the rules are. Hell, Patrick doesn’t know what the rules are on the road, either. But they’re running out of time til everything maybe changes. So he squeezes Pete’s hand, tugs him into the squalorous ‘privacy’ of the lived-in van. “Well, we don’t,” he says. “Pants off, Wentz.”_

_He doesn’t know how to ask what they are, to name what he wants them to be. So instead he pushes Pete onto his back, puts his tongue in Pete’s mouth, kisses with hungry gratitude that they’ve been kissing all summer and longing ache to continue kissing once they’re home again. Maybe it’s like the Navy, or prison, or any other stereotype where men are all you have access to: maybe for Pete he’s just a Lunchable fuck, something neat, portable, and easy to grab. Maybe that’s what Pete is to Patrick too. But oh, god, as Pete gets Patrick’s belt undone and Patrick fumbles with a condom, he doesn’t think so. As Patrick loosens Pete with greasy fingers, he doesn’t think so. As Pete bites the shape of Patrick’s name into Patrick’s throat, he doesn’t think so._

_Pressing into Pete, feeling Pete buck back against him, the newness of this, the impossible hot-gold goodness, the look in Pete’s heavy half-open eyes: what Patrick thinks is, he loves Pete._

_He can feel the gold, see the shimmer. He knows this isn’t real, not now, not yet. But their bodies move together, Pete hot and close, his mouth needy, his gaze soft, and Patrick doesn’t care where he is, really, or when. As long as it’s here. As long as he ends up coming here._

*

It’s the beginning of something between them. They aren’t talking about it—aren’t naming it—aren’t compromising plausible deniability—but Patrick is receiving proof from the future. Patrick knows this is the start of something real.

Pete is avoiding him right up until Pete can no longer avoid him. Like gravity, lust holds them down in starless cities. Pins them to the crusty carpet in the back of the van when no one else is around. Pete is avoiding him until Patrick follows him to the bar after their set one night, grabs him by the shirt collar, fists cotton right up near his face, and yells in his ringing ear, “Are you _ever_ gonna kiss me again?”

They tumble, then. Their hips crash. They meet in the swell. They kiss open-mouth ragged backstage, hump with desperation against brick walls outside clubs, touch each other tentatively, trembling, tumultuous, in shared showers and motel pools, all across the country daring each other, building up to breakneck speed. They scald each other all summer. Patrick is made of bitemarks and goosebumps. There is never a moment at which some part of his anatomy is not swollen. They are always reaching for one another just out of stage lights, in the shadows, out in back of anything but never in the front. They are always reaching.

It’s the beginning, bloodrush excitement and electrified skin and the brainpan-rattle rush of grinding up your own potential and snorting it. It’s the beginning, and Patrick starts getting hit with flashes of the end.

They’re on a date, sort of. Their version of a date. There’s hours to kill before their show tonight, everyone’s broke, and it’s hotter than Tatooine. Pete and Patrick are walking to a gas station for Icees. Their hands hang between them, littlest fingers every now and then brushing. Casual, casual. Each illicit touch sets off fireworks in Patrick’s brain, dazzles him bright and stupid. There’s a hickey slowly purpling on Pete’s neck, languid as it rises in the shape of Patrick’s teeth. Casual. Their hands touch, almost. The air is Midwest-thick, midsummer-hot. Pete’s skin glitters with tiny, sweated salt crystals. There’s not a part of him Patrick doesn’t want to lick. Casual.

“Cherry. Boring guy like you, it’s gotta be cherry,” Pete guesses. They’re playing favorites.

“Wait, _I’m_ boring? Your favorite Icee flavor is… Coke. What All-American bullshit.”

Pete pulls a mock-scandalized face. “One, you’re wrong. Two, Coke flavor is _edgy_. Like, emos everywhere want relief from the hot summer sun, right? They’re sweaty, the A/C doesn’t work in their car, and it’s so hot their overplayed Cure cassette is starting to melt. But their image of effortless anguish would be, like, totally shattered by a blue raspberry tongue. Coke Icee to the fuckin’ rescue!”

Patrick studies Pete’s animated mouth, imagines that troublemaking tongue dyed sucrose blue. Imagines blue-tongued licks up the inside of Patrick’s thighs, imagines a blue-tongued flick at the head of his dick. His voice comes out a little husky when he says, “I think I need you to get blue raspberry.”

“You give me cherry-red lips, I’ll give you a blue tongue,” Pete leers, grinning. He licks his lips, exaggerated and silly but still somehow sexy. That’s his whole vibe, really.

“Deal,” Patrick says. His heart flutters sticky in his chest and he goes for it, darting his hand out to catch Pete’s. They walk like this, hands linked, Pete with chipped nail polish, Patrick with a cloth wristband, and Patrick’s heart speeds with the touch as much as the danger. Everyone who drives past sees them, the challenge they set. Boys get beat in towns like this for holding hands with one another. Patrick holds Pete’s hand and wonders if he’s ever been happier.

“So, wanna hear my plans for your red lips?” Pete asks. Patrick’s knees go weak, he thinks from the general lasciviousness Pete’s exuding, but then the dizzy dickrush of blood hits him, the world goes white, and he’s seconds from an orgasm in another place.

They’re in a shower stall somewhere he doesn’t recognize—and it’s _himandpete, himandpete_ , who else would it be—and the air is cool-bright with daylight and the shower spray is pleasantly warm and it’s a closed feedback loop, Pete’s hand on his cock and Patrick’s on Pete’s, their hips and bellies pressed and the soft, soft skin of Pete’s side where the soft, soft head of Patrick’s dick gathers friction against it, and the world is a wonder of slickness, and his teeth gasp against Pete’s collarbone, and just as he’s coming a noise comes out of Pete that’s the edge of a sob, and Pete mumbles miserable, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore,” and Patrick realizes his eyes are squeezed shut out of pain and not bliss, and it’s too late to stop himself and he comes, hot onto both of them, and the shower water swirls down their bodies, and Pete turns away from him crying, fluids flowing hot hot hot and mixing on their bodies til there’s no difference, it’s all just liquid, everything’s just spinning down the drain.

Pete’s hands are on him in the real world, the now world, and he’s on his knees on the side of the road and it’s sticky and wet inside his pants and he feels like cat shit about what just happened, what’s going to happen.

“I think you have, like, epilepsy. Most people don’t fall  down this much,” Pete tells him, trying to help him up. Patrick swats his hands away. Pete’s touch suddenly makes him feel slimy.

“It’s heatstroke,” he lies, pushing himself up onto his own feet. The hot asphalt burns the palms of his hands with summer grit. “Shouldn’t be out walking wearing all black when it’s 90 degrees out. Let’s go back.”

“But the gas station’s right up there!” Pete protests. “Water, a cherry Icee, maybe fool around in the beer cooler—you’ll feel loads better. Scout’s honor.”

Patrick can’t stop himself cringing away from Pete. He’s sick with his own future claustrophobic sadness. “I can’t,” he says, unconsciously echoing Pete of the Future. “I can’t do this.”

“Wait. You can’t do the gas station, or…?”

Patrick’s shaking his head. Taking a step away from Pete’s reaching hand. No, no no no no. He was so fucking happy. This was supposed to—it wasn’t meant to end. It wasn’t meant to end somewhere in the future when it’s only just beginning, like Patrick’s used up all that’s good about _himandpete_ before he’s ever even had it.

Patrick’s babbling, laughing a little in this broken-hearted, rotten-fruit kind of way, sounding like a madman. “It just hit me,” he says, “that one day you’re going to break my heart. Your hair will be longer, your face a little older, new tattoos showing up on your skin, and you’ll look at me with all the gorgeous moments that have passed between us, and you’ll decide you’re done with me. That you don’t want me anymore. It’s inevitable. It’s so inevitable that anything we do now, at gas stations or where-the-fuck-ever, it’s just—killing time. T-minus, like, four years to heartbreak.” He does not even care that he sounds insane.

“What are you _talking_ about?” Pete looks wounded in a sharp way—boy breaks outwards. Pete looks mad. It’s 2004: Pete’s always mad.

“Someone like you,” Patrick says. “Someone like me. I know for a fact it’s not going to work.”

Pete closes the distance between them. Grabs Patrick by the shoulders. Says, “You’re fucking crazy. Someone like me would never let someone like you go.” Kisses him in broad fucking daylight, just smashes their faces together while Midwesterners in rusted-out Honda Civics and maroon minivans drive past. Patrick has never had a vision of this kiss, but it starts with ice like fear in his gut and lifts through him, as if to raise him by the lapels, and quivers through every hair on his body, til his whole nervous system is standing at attention, getting ripped up by the molten friction of _it’s-going-to-work-and-I’ll-prove-it-to-you_.

And as Patrick is melted from within by the volcanic force of that kiss, he decides he’s not going to be heartbroken. He’s not going to lose Pete, visions be damned. This Pete doesn’t want to lose him either. Patrick is going to figure out how to send a message forward through time, and he’s going to change the future.

He grabs Pete’s belt loops and pulls the other boy hard against him, turns the spark inside himself into kissing back. If he’s going to invent time travel, and do it fast enough to make a difference? He and Pete are gonna need to stop wasting time and get busy coming. They’re gonna need a _lot_ of orgasms.

*

He tries sending messages forward through time to save his still-nascent relationship with Pete with his dick in his hand in bathroom stalls across the country. He keeps smacking his elbow against the narrow walls. He manages to, um, finish, but it’s not pretty. He _reaches_ , deep in his center, words tumbling over his lips as he chants _don’t let him go, don’t let him go_ , as he sends that gush of marrow-deep, clawing _love_ outwards. He reaches, sending whatever he thinks will convince his future self to stop his hurt heart from closing down and pushing Pete out. He reaches, but he doesn’t even graze the gold.

He tries til he’s got tennis elbow, til his dick is raw, til he’s run up against the impermeable border of time so many times he thinks he’s lost the trick of slipping through. He tries til he’s panting and sticky, flat on his back on the narrow mattress of a borrowed bed somewhere in Georgia, staring up at the ceiling fan.

It washes over him in that spent moment: a rush of desperation. Horniness all tangled up with fear of loss. He hears Pete’s voice from somewhen, a dozy murmur: “Tell me you love me.” He feels Pete’s warm grip around him, feels Pete’s fingertips press into his hip, feels Pete’s mouth biting at the tension in his shoulders, Pete kissing into his neck from behind. They’re curled on a mattress, Patrick’s ass grinding into Pete’s crotch, Patrick’s blood thundering and thrilling through him where Pete’s hardness presses back, pushing and pulling against one another. It’s sweaty and sleepy and he can’t quite tell if he’s awake, just that it feels better than anything, that he will move towards this with everything he has, til he runs out—

And then he feels his future heart curdle around a seed of bitterness. Because isn’t he? Isn’t he running out? The hot-and-cold, the on-and-off, the not-where-they-can-see-us. The not-saying, never-naming. _Tell me you love me,_ says Pete, and Patrick says nothing. Patrick says nothing while Pete gets him off. Patrick makes no sound when he comes. He just finishes, rolls over. Closes his eyes and goes to sleep.

That Patrick, this Patrick, they’re the same Patrick. They have the same heart. Patrick feels his rabbiting in his chest, sticky in the hot Southern darkness. He aches, his pulse a trapped and muggy thing that strains in his sore body.

He can’t fix this on his own.

*

_His own body in the mirror he barely recognizes. Patrick’s always struggled with his weight, gone through bouts of starving off his natural curves since he was about 12, but he’s never imagined a body like this: lithe, hard with visible muscle, small and dynamic. His hair is surreal too, big and blond and flashy, drawing the eye in the exact way Patrick’s been trying to dodge his whole life._

_Hands on his slim hips—the outline of a larger tattooed body behind his—a dark head bowed over Patrick’s shoulder, sharp canines in Patrick’s skin, suction and tongue. He doesn’t recognize Pete at first either, his hair buzzed military-short, a severity and absence of styling that doesn’t suit any version of Pete he’s ever known. Pete looks up from Patrick’s collarbone and meets his eyes in the mirror. When has Patrick ever seen him look so sad?_

_Patrick’s misbehaving heartbeat swells his cock and he can feel Pete pushing against his ass, grinding into the sensitive nerve endings that line his hole. It should be a sexy moment, but all Patrick feels in his chest is a deep splintering._

_“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Patrick watches himself say in the mirror._

_“You’re not you and I’m not me,” Pete whispers to Patrick’s reflection. His teeth nip Patrick’s ear and Patrick’s hips ripple in answer. “Should is irrelevant here.”_

_They didn’t break up, Pete and Patrick. They didn’t break up because they were never together. He tells himself this. He uses it to harden his heart. Pete took his band from him. Pete took himself from him. No. Pete set him free._

_Pete’s fingers stretch to brush Patrick’s swell. “Say yes,” he mouths against Patrick’s ear. Everything about this is agonizing. Why does it make his dick throb, if he’s in pain? Pete wraps his grip around Patrick, strokes down. Patrick moves into the pull. Patrick can’t open his mouth without giving himself away, without yelling how angry he is, without crying how he misses this. Patrick turns his head, catches Pete’s mouth, kisses him roughly. Patrick’s hand comes up and finds Pete’s chin, steers his jaw, parts his lips and teeth with a violent tongue. Patrick uses his kiss to say_ yes to having this, no to needing it. _Patrick uses his heart to feel nothing at all. Pete’s hand moves faster and faster. Patrick kisses til they both go blind. When he comes, fluid smearing over his own belly, it is with a sharp and bitter tug. It is with a feeling of breaking. It is a way of losing it all._

_Patrick falls to his knees somewhere in the future, a sob puncturing his closed lips. He bites his tongue as if to pulp the taste of Pete off of it. He touches his own cheeks and feels the wetness there, tears and come both passing through the flickering, translucent skin of time._

*

Heart whipping against his ribs, Patrick creeps down the hall to the room where Pete and Joe share bunk beds in this house-of-a-family-friend-of-their-producer. They put their bodies in the strangest, least certain places on tours like this. Patrick clings to the vision he’s had of fucking Pete, muffled and laughing, in the bunk of a bougie tour bus: one day they’ll make it. There’s a future where they have it all. All Patrick has to do is find it.

He braces himself to take a breath and leap.

There’s always a risk, approaching Pete. Whatever they are to each other, it’s something liminal: not a place you can ever really go or be, but a transition, something you pass through without naming. It is not like having a girlfriend, not that Patrick is such a seasoned professional at that. It’s not like having anyone. It’s like playing craps: dice throw after dice throw, hoping the number comes up lucky. Hoping Pete doesn’t push him away, sneer, say, _Dude, don’t you think that’s kinda gay?_ , undo everything unspoken between them with one cruelly placed word. This is something that has happened to Patrick before: a boy kissing another boy under playground equipment and that boy kissing back, til one day at the bottom of the tube slide that boy told him, _my dad saw about homos on the news and you’re one of ‘em, do that to me again and I’m telling_. Affirmation— _I want this, I want you_ —is not enough. When you’re a boy kissing boys, anything short of public declaration can be turned back against you. Like Judas, any boy you ever kiss could be your next denier.

So: down the hall he creeps. Over Pete’s bed he stands. All the sexiness that’s passed between them, all the sexiness that’s yet to come, it coils through his veins like a fat yellow snake, greedy for goodness; but hesitation, the fear of rejection, prickles goosebumps into his skin too. The hot needy inside of him presses against his cautious skin. Every part of him is just trying to escape.

“Pete?” he whispers. He takes the risk. His hand darts to Pete’s shoulder, a bare sliver of skin poking above the comforter.

Pete’s soft as silk, cool as moonlight. Patrick’s fingers skim the slope of his shoulder, the shadows under his collarbone. He aches with want, not for this moment but for what could be. If he can save it. If they can—

“Jesus!” Pete gasps, jolting awake to Patrick looming over him in the dark. He grabs Patrick by the forearms and yanks him down into the bed. Pete squeezes him awkwardly to his bare chest, his fear-spiked pulse buzzing against Patrick’s cheek. “You a fucking serial killer, Rick? I was almost just your first kill.”

Patrick climbs more fully into the bed, placing his body tentatively beside Pete’s. Pete squirms closer, presses against him, closes the gap of plausible ‘no homo’ deniability. Patrick’s clenched heart exhales.

“Third kill,” Patrick says, smile invisible in the dark. “But since you caught me—wanna fool around instead?”

Pete kisses him grin first, teeth against skin, and thumps his hips against Patrick’s, a horny exaggeration that rocks the bunk bed and makes Patrick laugh.

“Stop pleasuring yourself, Peter,” Joe sleep-complains from the top bunk. “ _For the fourth time._ Feel like I’m at sea.”

Pete covers Patrick’s laughter with a kiss. Somehow, they haven’t been caught yet. Haven’t been found out. Patrick usually feels relief about that, but tonight he gets a twist in his chest. He wishes he could peer into the future at will. Do they ever tell their friends? Do they ever tell _anyone_? Do they ever say it to each other, or even whisper it to themselves?

He’s too busy frowning about it to properly return Pete’s kiss. Pete breaks away, murmurs: “Let’s go to your room.”

Patrick thought he was coming in here for sex, so they’re both surprised when he says, “Outside instead.”

Pete pinches at his inner thighs while they sneak through the dark, sleeping house, trying to get him to shriek. Patrick swats his hands away, somewhere between laughing and actually mad. They emerge onto the creaking veranda, thick midnight air just as hot and humid as it was at noon. Cicadas grind their street organ song into the night. The trees are too thick around the house to see stars.

“You want me to blow you on this fine Southern front porch, in front of god and everyone?” Pete leers, his pink lips dipping into his most lascivious smirk, the one Patrick can feel all the way down in the tight dark core of him.

Patrick’s poor worn-out dick twitches in spite of itself. “Uh, I mean, yes,” he says. “But—god you’re distracting—could we talk first?”

Pete’s already on his knees, already tugging at the end of Patrick’s sleep shorts. “Is that what you really want?” he asks, dick-level. His eyes glitter, beetles and oil, in the weak moonlight. He brushes his lips against the head of Patrick’s cock through the fabric, grazes his teeth against the ridge, bites it into his damp mouth and sucks til Patrick’s shorts are hot and wet, til Patrick’s hard and squirming, til Patrick’s thrusting hips answer the question without him. Pete shucks Patrick’s shorts off and Patrick’s hand finds the back of Pete’s head, guiding it—holding it— _pressing_ it in place. His other hand digs divots into Pete’s shoulder, for dear life holding on. Pete’s mouth is clever, quick, tight, wet. Patrick forgets he ever wanted to talk. Patrick loses language entirely. Just like before, just like in his vision-memory, Pete looks up at him. His mouth full and slipping around Patrick’s dick, Pete meets his eyes. And Patrick can’t stop himself. Patrick cries out. Patrick lets go.

*

He tries to send a message, the gut-ripping heart-bubbling feeling of _inlovewithPete,_ but nothing goes to gold. He can’t tell if he’s getting through.

*

_Patrick’s in the shower, his back and shoulders getting hammered by water pressure the likes of which he’s never known. His body is soft, moving in the direction of gravity, heavy with time. He is older than he’s ever been. He doesn’t recognize his surroundings. He’s used to it by now: this is the future. This is coming, from the future._

_He’s in the shower and his hand is slick, grippy with shower gel, fisted tight around his dick. He pulls rhythmically, the motion feeling like erasing, and trances himself out. The emptier his head is, the tighter his guts clench, quivering with_ almost _. His prostate throbs inside him instead of someone else. It’s fine. He’s fine. Everything is fine._

_Pete’s not there. No one is. Patrick squeezes his eyes shut, thinks of how it peaceful it would be if he could abandon all his responsibilities and just stop existing, and lets himself go._

*

Living like nomads in sweaty summer spaces, traveling all day and reveling all night like fairy tale princes, spinning out aimless hours roving through small town Americana, making out til their mouths swell up like August afternoons, reaching for one another in the gasping night. Patrick wants to feel it all with his whole heart, but the future distance between he and Pete tangles up with the easy immediacy of their intimacy now. He wants the reckless joy of sneaking around, the dizzy bliss of putting his hands all over someone beautiful, the healing newness of wanting someone who wants him back—a connection that holds potential for _happiness_ , not just heartbreak.

He wants it all, only: the shadow of the future hangs over him. He stings with early rejection every time Pete drops his hand when someone comes around the corner, every time Pete flirts with some stranger with nice tits, every time Pete roughhouses with him publicly in an effortlessly platonic way like it’s easy for him to stop his hands short, to simply refrain from touching Patrick in the way he wants to be touched.

It hurts. It fucking hurts, okay? It hurts like a faultline. A seismic frailty their foreshortened future shifts along, speeding up. It hurts and Patrick wants _words_ for it, not just touching.

Every day Patrick is less satisfied by just touching.

One beautiful night midsummer, they’re fooling around backstage waiting for their set to start. Patrick feels like his blood is made of iodine and stardust. He crackles. He’s ready to _go_. If there ever was a night he could send a message forward in time, he knows it’s tonight. The crowd is chanting their name out there, ravenous for music in the way Patrick is ravenous for Pete, is ravenous for life.

Only, no matter what Pete does to him? Patrick’s putting so much pressure on himself, on this whole situation, that he cannot come.

They’re entangled on a couch in the grungy space titled Dressing Room, stripping down to nearly nothing—Pete’s skinny jeans still trail off one ankle—and both of their faces are red with the effort. Pete’s massaging his jaw one-handed, kind of laughing. “Jeez, Rick,” he teases. “I’m starting to ache not in the fun way, here. Have I lost my touch, or…?”

“I’m sorry,” Patrick says for the tenth time. He’s so fucking embarrassing. “It feels really good, like so good. I really want to, um. I’m so horny it’s like I’m dying. But I just, uh… it’s like I’m at the edge of the high dive and I just can’t… I’m so sorry.”

Pete hauls himself up the couch, leaving Patrick’s red dick laying wet and half-hard against Patrick’s belly. He props himself on an elbow to lay beside Patrick, to frown down at him, to trace thorny patterns on the pale skin of Patrick’s uninked chest. “Hey, c’mon. You know I hate it when you apologize to me during sex,” Pete says. “Do you want to keep going? It might be nice to just, like. Lay here and cuddle for a minute.”

“I’d like that,” Patrick says. He’s choked up so thick on his own frustration and regret, he can barely get his voice to sound.

“We don’t cuddle enough,” Pete tells him, nestling his head down in the hollow of Patrick’s shoulder, the curve of Patrick’s neck. Patrick’s arms come up around Pete’s back tentatively. He doesn’t know how to hold Pete, how to keep him. “Why don’t we cuddle?”

“We’re always too busy trying not to get caught.” Patrick’s too mad at himself, too close to tears, too sexually frustrated and anxious about the future to remember to lie. “It’s not like if we were dating.”

Pete goes still, maybe, or else he’s just found a comfortable position. “Yeah, I guess,” he says sleepily. His lips feel like velvet against Patrick’s skin. They’re supposed to go on in ten minutes, but Patrick wants to spend the rest of his life on this couch. Or at least long enough to figure out how to _come_ , damn it, and send a message to the future. Long enough to figure out how to keep this.

It’s Patrick’s turn to go still when Pete murmurs, “Tell me why we aren’t dating?”

_Because you don’t want to_ , Patrick stops himself from saying. _Because no one ever wants to_. “Because then everybody would find out about us,” he says instead. “And that would be bad.”

He doesn’t actually know _why_ it would be bad—no one’s ever explained that part to him—but if there’s one thing Patrick’s learned from his limited sexual experiences in life, it’s that discovery must be avoided. Discovery is punishment, social ostracization, homosexuality, death. Boys can only kiss other boys if no one knows about it. If no one sees. Patrick doesn’t know if he believes that, exactly. But other people believe it. Turns out that’s enough.

“Patrick?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s a very good point.”

Hope Patrick didn’t know he’s been holding folds in. The last of his longing drains out of him, his dick officially lifeless. The feeling of Pete’s head on his chest—it’s almost perfect. It’s almost everything he wants.

“If we lay like this long enough, do you think we can get our hearts to beat in time?” Pete murmurs, sweet against his skin.

Patrick closes his eyes and pretends not to hear.

*

Now that he’s developed a mental block about sex, the time travel project has stalled. Patrick’s pretty fed up with the idea of changing the future, anyway. Today he’s feeling ornery, thinking fuck it, thinking maybe I’ll just change the present instead.

They’re home again, out of summer, out of time. The four of them—Pete, Patrick, Andy, Joe—sit in a booth at one of their favorite shitty pizza places down the street from Wrigley. Patrick feels a little lost and desperate, staring down a greasy slice that swims with poorly fastened pepperonis. Pete’s hand is under the table creeping up Patrick’s inner thigh. Patrick squirms, wanting towards-and-away at once. They’re home now, and he doesn’t know which time is going to be the last time. They’re home and he doesn’t know what he is to Pete. He hasn’t gotten any flashes from the future, hasn’t had any orgasms at all, in two weeks. They’re home and Pete makes his skin burn, ache and want and longing, uncertainty and hurt and time-displaced rage.

Pete’s hand crawls higher and his mouth curls in a self-satisfied smirk, and Patrick knows he likes it, the tension of making Patrick’s hips roll while their bandmates sit right across the table. Patrick’s supposed to school his face, keep the secret, so everything’s sexy and fun—so later, when he can’t take it, he can make the excuse of going to the bathroom and crabwalk to the back of the restaurant, trying to hide his boner, and wait breathless in the handicap stall to see whether Pete is going to follow—

And Patrick is just, honestly, _over it_. Pete’s fingers trace over the head of his dick and Patrick decides fuck time travel, fuck secret trysting, fuck everything. “Jesus, Pete,” he blurts out loudly. “Can you keep your hands off my dick for one hour? We’re in a _restaurant_.”

Because if time travel doesn’t work, maybe he’ll try communication instead. Instead of worrying about stress fractures in the far-off future, maybe he’ll just ask for what he needs in the present. Maybe he’ll even get it.

Half-chewed pizza flops out of Joe’s open mouth, which he seems to have forgotten how to close. Andy’s choking on Mountain Dew. Pete, who Patrick almost never sees sweat, has turned a bloodless shade of yellow. His hand has retracted entirely. Patrick is usually grumpy about the loss of Pete’s touch, but he’s pretty pleased with himself right now.

Patrick casually takes a huge bite of his pizza slice. Pete mutters to the tabletop, “Sorry.” Andy, once again aspirating, demands, “Um, what?”

“Seconded,” chokes Joe.

Patrick shrugs one shoulder like it couldn’t be less of an issue. “Me and Pete,” he says around a mouthful of elastic cheese. “We’ve been fooling around all summer. Thought it was obvious.”

“And I thought it was something we were using discretion about?” Pete’s still muttering, but Patrick can hear the edge of whine in his voice.

“Fooling around _where_ though?” asks Joe, looking squeamish. “Not while we’ve been sharing rooms and beds and living room floors? Not right next to me. Not in my _van_?”

Pete flashes Joe a stricken look. Patrick just keeps chewing his pizza.

“Nooooo!” protests Joe. “No! No semen in my van. Guys, c’mon. Tell me there’s no jizz in my fucking _van_!”

“Joe,” Andy says, elbowing the guitarist. “Zoom out, dude. This is a big deal. Maybe even bigger than your upholstery.”

Joe takes Andy by the shoulders. “That van is our _home_!” he cries, overdramatic and playing it for effect, clowning to break some of the tension.

And you know what? A lot worse things could happen when you come out to your friends than this. Patrick feels so much relief he could start laughing, except for the color on Pete’s face. Nothing ever really sticks to Pete. He’s built his name out of never caring what anyone thinks, as long as it’s about him. So, now? Seeing shame on Pete Wentz, slumping his shoulders and lowering his gaze and twisting his face? It turns Patrick’s guts sour. He’s never asked Pete to tell people about what’s been happening between them, so he’s never had the chance to hear Pete’s objections. Suddenly he’s pretty worried about the content of those objections.

Subtlety, it’s not really Patrick’s thing. Apparently. Because he turns to face Pete in the unpadded Formica booth and says, “You’re ashamed of me.” He means it to be a question, but it comes out flat. Crisp. Decisive. It explains everything, is the thing. Pete is ashamed of him. The truth of it, a grand unifying principle of shittiness, ripples out from this moment and withers their entire future. Has withered, will withered, will have withered. Whatever. It all sucks.

“You just outed me, without warning or permission, to my best friends,” Pete says. His voice is strained to cracking. “I need a fucking minute.”

That’s true, and valid, but something about it sticks in Patrick’s craw. “Sorry, was it my job to let you do whatever you wanted to my body and feelings and never say a word about it?” he snaps. Pete makes a face like Patrick just hit him. “I’ve been trying to talk to you,” he says. “You make me so happy, and what we have is so good, and—and eventually you’re gonna be so afraid to say out loud what we are to each other that we’ll lose this thing completely. We’ll lose the band, we’ll lose our friendship. I’ve seen it. It’s a black hole that eats it all.”

Pete has slid down so far in the booth that most of his body is pooled under the table. His chin is level with his discarded pizza slice.

“I’m part of this too,” Patrick says firmly, making himself believe it. “I don’t exist to like, receive Pete Wentz gratefully. I get to ask for things too.”

Pete looks up at Patrick from under dark, furrowed brows. “Of course you get to ask for things,” he says, his voice small.

“So be with me for real,” Patrick says. It’s simple. “I’m asking you. Tell me why we’re not dating, and… let’s date anyway. Let’s not go down the path that takes us to a shitty future.”

Protestation bubble to Pete’s lips, the way things _ought to be_ and what’s _allowed_ and what _someone like him_ would do to the reputation of _someone like Patrick_. Patrick’s heard it all before, somehow: a thousand repetitive conversations they haven’t yet had. A hundred ways they haven’t hurt each other, yet.

So he interrupts. He says what Pete will tell him so painfully one day, years from now, in the future where they’ve lost one another. He hopes it’s soon enough to make a difference. “Should is irrelevant here. Just—trust me when I say we’re meant to be together. And say yes.”

“Pete,” Andy urges in the same voice he used to say _Joe_ a minute ago. Patrick feels him kick Pete under the table. “C’mon.”

Joe chimes in, “You defiled my _van_ together. The least you can do is go on a date!”

“Guys,” Patrick says. “Give us a minute?”

“You want _us_ to leave?” says Joe. Andy just picks up their two plates and walks them over to the counter, where there are plenty of open stools. Joe makes a big show of rolling his eyes, muttering, “Like I haven’t lost my entire fucking appetite,” but Andy didn’t miscalculate: Joe always follows the pizza.

There’s a long silence after their friends leave, Pete shifting in the booth beside Patrick, studying his slice up close and not saying anything. He keeps opening his mouth, closing it again. Pete is not exactly known for being laconic. Patrick’s getting pretty nervous about whatever he’s just done to the timeline, by throwing a public feelings grenade into it. Having Pete and losing him, surely, would have been better than not having Pete at all.

When Pete starts speaking, it’s so softly that Patrick doesn’t hear him at first. “What?” he asks.

Pete says to his pizza slice, “I _said_ , ‘someone like me would never let someone like you go.’ That day with the Icees. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Pete says, and shrugs, like that answers anything.

Patrick swats his shoulder, and Pete’s startled enough by the blow to actually turn his head and look at Patrick. Patrick privately thinks it’s a little ridiculous that Pete thought it was no big deal to touch Patrick’s dick but is having such a hard time meeting Patrick’s eyes. “Well what? I’m sorry I outed you, but right now you’re kind of being an asshole.”

Pete’s mouth flicks into the tiniest smile. “I’m always an asshole,” he says. “It’s part of my charm. You’re being real, like, Terminator about this whole thing—you know that? ‘Come with me if you want your band to live.’”

“I was sent from the future to save our relationship,” Patrick laughs. “I mean, kinda. It was more like I was sent an orgasm from the future.”

“Wait, what?”

“Time travel,” Patrick says, which is not an explanation. “Like the first time you kissed me. Just believe me, Pete. And maybe be my boyfriend? Where other people can see us. That’s all I’m asking for. That’s all I want.”

It happens so quickly that even Patrick’s oracular dick doesn’t see it coming. Pete shoots up in his seat, kisses Patrick on the mouth with a little too much momentum, their teeth cracking together and Patrick’s lip immediately blooming into blood. Pete kisses the blood on his lips, tongues it into Patrick’s mouth, and it feels right somehow, like sealing a pact. Patrick’s pent-up penis stirs in his pants, ready to go, and suddenly crabwalking to the handicap stall and dragging Pete in after him sounds like a fine idea. “Is this ‘where other people can see us’ enough for you?” Pete growls against Patrick’s mouth.

“It is,” says Patrick. He catches Pete by the jaw and kisses him back.

*

That night, they fuck in a real, actual bed for the first time ever. Patrick doesn’t try to send anything anywhere. Together, he and Pete hit the gold place. The whole world gets limned in glimmer, goes to glitter, shines brighter than Mars, and Patrick doesn’t know where the orgasm ultimately ends up. He hopes it makes him happy, whenever he is. It makes him very fucking happy in the now.

Before they fall asleep, Pete settles onto Patrick’s chest, ear over heartbeat, and whispers, “I can’t believe I have a _boyfriend_ ” into the rush of Patrick’s blood. Patrick holds him with a little more surety now. This is something that has never happened, in the future he gets (used to get?) visions from. He doesn’t know what path it is they’re walking now.

“I can’t believe I’m somebody’s,” Patrick whispers back. Pete lifts his head, bites and then kisses Patrick’s nipple.

“Nonsense,” Pete tells the nipple. “You’ve always been mine. Always will be.”

Patrick doesn’t know if that’s true. His orgasms don’t either. But he looks forward to finding out, together with Pete, living in a forward direction—loving in order.

 


End file.
